Devil in the White City
by coefficient
Summary: LOZCyberpunk fusion. When a down-on-his-luck hacker named Link decides to take a lucrative job from a mysterious man in black, he's catapulted into the mythic conflict between good and evil beyond his wildest fantasies. Chapter 1 edited.


He saw it in his dreams.  
  
The Net. Soaring through cities of data at the speed of thought, bright lattices of logic unfolding before him in the black nothingness, a million files, a billion secrets, a trillion dollars – all within his grasp. He was the disease in the lifeblood of the world, that parasite which sucked up information and spit it out, having learned all it wanted. He was the night itself, slipping into banks and databases like a shadow, only to steal away with the twitch of a finger, the slightest breath...  
  
Quickly now. The lattices began to close in, mountains of zeroes and ones pressing in like the hands of Hercules, but no matter how fast he flew, how he sliced through firewalls and shattered encryption, the light at the end of the Net grew dimmer until finally it vanished, leaving him alone in a sea of pixels with only the hollow mechanical laughter of his deck to console him...  
  
And he was awake. The alarm-clock implant screamed murder into his auditory cortex as he jumped up with a start.  
  
-----  
  
DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY  
  
A cyberpunk adaptation of the Legend of Zelda by coefficient  
  
-----  
  
The sky was the colour of concrete, blotched with dark clouds pouring their misery upon the broken earth. Link's umbrella did him little good; it was a knockoff, cheaply made, and the latex threatened to come apart were it subjected to any more than a light drizzle. It was also the best he could afford. Link figured he ought to feel sorry for himself.  
  
But –  
  
This was Clock City! The pride of Greater Termina, this shining citadel of gleaming marble was a sight to behold, and its residents were arguably the luckiest people in the world. Here there was luxury, here there was poverty, but whether rich or poor all citizens lived in one of the wonders of the modern age. Once Terminan scientists had learned to harness the gravity of their ever-angry moon, they lifted their city into the heavens, freeing it from the whips and scorns of weather that had produced such unpredictable conditions – to the north of the city was a land of eternal winter, and to the west a swamp. It was a wonder anyone was able to live there at all. But this city in the sky was a monument to the ability of man to overcome, and a testament to the ingenuity of Termina. But it was still a city, and all cities have their malcontents.  
  
Link was host to most of them.  
  
He folded up his umbrella and entered the Crown and Eagle to the murmured greetings of its patrons. "Hey, Barkeep," growled one of them, an old, scarred, greying man with a whirring Hyrulian prosthetic arm. "Get me a Hylian ale. It better be good, I didn't lose my arm in the god-damn war to drink some ill-bred Moblin's knockoff."  
  
"Chill out, Brass. Relax. Today's veteran's day. Half off." Link chuckled.  
  
"Shut up, pointy. You're giving me half-off because you still get 200% markup. You in cahoots with these moblins or what?" Brass frowned. It was an old frown, the kind of frown that had seen grown men piss themselves at the sight of two-thousand moblins with rifles running towards them with murder in their eyes.  
  
"Only in your head, man. They do business too roughly for me to want to lean on them too much. They make good product, though. Hardly tell the difference." Link took a swig of Moblin ale himself, savoring the bitter holocaust that it visited upon his tastebuds.  
  
"You and the rest of these unpatriotic pencildicks."  
  
"That's not what your mom said last night, hero."  
  
"Yeah. Whatever."  
  
The subvocal murmur that pervaded the smoky air of the bar died suddenly, and the lights dimmed, in sharp contrast to the bright white spotlight that lit up an ancient oaken stage. Link quieted as well. He'd seen a couple of the acts that were to perform today, but not all of them, and not, he suspected, the best of them.  
  
Nope, he'd never seen this one before. A pretty blonde, with the pointed ears that suggested high birth, walked – no, floated – onto center stage in a slinky red gown. The piano began to play softly, assisted by a saxophone and a bass guitar; a light, jazzy tune, perfectly suited for the dusky ambience of the Crown and Eagle. The conversation was muted, subdued; the patrons gave precedence to this strange noblewoman's song, in soaring Hylian couplets.  
  
Link himself was mesmerized until he saw a potential sale. It was a man, like everyone else who came to this godsforsaken place, but too well- dressed to be here for the drinks. He set down his black fedora on the bar.  
  
"Barkeep," he said evenly, "a White Russian, if you please."  
  
"Yes, sir," Link affirmed, and deftly mixed the cream and Vodka.  
  
"You've got hacker's hands, son," the man observed. "And there's a jack in your neck. Do much decking?"  
  
"From time to time," Link said guardedly. "It's a hobby."  
  
The man laughed – a soft, clear laugh, with well-defined pitch and tone. "You're a lousy liar, kid. I've seen hobbyists before. They move like drunken seagulls. You, however – your hands are precise, like a surgeon's, but I'd bet my bottom dollar you've never seen the inside of a university."  
  
"That's a good bet, sir." Link was a bit puzzled, but hey, a sale's a sale. "Still, what I do on my own time is my own business. Right now I'm a barkeep, mixing you a White Russian – which, by the way, is done. Here you go. That'll be fifty credits." The man slid his credstick out of his coat with practiced ease and swiped it across the Bank of Hyrule all-commerce machine with precision.  
  
"Whatever you say, kid. Your hands don't lie. Those hands have broken more than their share of encryption, believe you me." He looked Link in the eye – grey, piercing orbs, they were, that stared straight through Link into the deepest recesses of his subconscious. "I've got a job for an experienced decker. Meet me at the Dungeon at 10 o'clock tonight – I'll be at the bar, just like now. I'll leave that credstick on the table. There's more where that came from." With a flourish, the man set his fedora back on his head and was on his way.  
  
Link glanced at the clock. It was 6. Lots of time to think it over.  
  
-----  
  
Clean-up at the Crown and Eagle was a simple affair; it served its patrons little outside glasses, so all that remained to be dealt with were tables and chairs. Link closed the ledgers, clocked in his time, and put on his coat, ready to greet the starry night that waited outside.  
  
"Hey."  
  
He turned around. Brass was standing in a corner near the entrance, his prosthesis strangely silent.  
  
"It's dangerous to go alone. Take this."  
  
From his coat he produced an old-looking pistol, along the Hyrulian designs of the Great War.  
  
"I used this in the war, and I want you to take it to the Dungeon tonight."  
  
"Oh, Godesses, Brass, I can't take this," Link protested.  
  
"It's mine and I can give it to you. This is going to sound hokey – hell, I can barely say it – but something's going to happen tonight. You're a good kid, Link. You need to stay safe."  
  
"If you say so, chief." Link took the pistol gingerly, like the relic of a lost age that it was, and slipped it into his coat.  
  
"You be careful now." Brass turned around and slipped into the cold urban night.  
  
-----  
  
The Dungeon was a swanky joint. Link figured that the movers and shakers of Clock City gathered here to discuss politics and economics or whatever rich people talked about in their spare time. Decked out in his faded jeans and moth-bitten Nintendo t-shirt, he was woefully underdressed.  
  
Still. He wasn't here to mingle. He was here to do a job. Where was that man? Who was he, anyway?  
  
"Over here, kid," said a familiar voice, barely audible over the throbbing bass of the DJ's music. Link meandered over to where he figured its source was, drawing condescending stares along the way.  
  
"You bring your gear?"  
  
"Yeah. You bring the cash?"  
  
"You bet. All fifty thousand rupees it."  
  
"Rupees?" Link was ecstatic – jewels, real jewels were worth uncounted millions of credits in the cashless and gemless economy of the modern world. All real rupees, which had long since been dug up, minted, then spent, were stored away somewhere, in some bank or vault, driving their value up severely.  
  
"You got it, kid. Here, follow me."  
  
The man, still dressed in the somber coat and fedora that he walked into the C and E with, led Link through the crowds to a service exit, then down a flight of stairs. The basement had a quite different atmosphere from the one that was presented to the public. The walls were of stone, with flickering, old-style incandescent bulbs flickering in the distance, creating and killing shadows with their dim yellow light. The air smelled slightly of mildew.  
  
"Hey, I didn't get your name,' Link offered lamely, desperate to break the deadly silence of the stone basement.  
  
"It's not important."  
  
The basement was a labyrinth, but the man in black must have had its map imprinted in his mind. Three turns and they came to a creaky wooden door, behind which was a clean white room with a single chair. "You'll find a jack on one of the arms. I need you to divert all police attention from this building for a few hours. Do that and the rupees are yours."  
  
Fifty thousand rupees for a little kiddie job like this? The man in black had to have been loaded, or insane, or perhaps both – generations of inbreeding among the "good" families of the city had produced a certain streak of hereditary insanity in the elite of Clock City. Still, Link wasn't one to look a gift horse in the mouth, despite the fact that he'd never actually gotten a horse as a gift. Something was in the air, other than the musky smell that characterized this whole godforsaken cave. Something big.  
  
Whatever it was, it wasn't his business. Link slipped on the VR headset, testing the sensory electrodes that gently brushed his temples, and connected the nerve adaptors to his fingertips.  
  
God, it had been so long, so very very long... to feel the rush of data through my brain, to soar through the fractal sky, to create and destroy at will. This was the Net, and he'd been too far from it for too long.  
  
"All right. Jack me in."  
  
The rush of nausea that accompanied the sudden interfacing of his neural network with a billion computers was exhilarating. A shout of joy pried open his lips and unleashed itself upon an unsuspecting world. His ears noted that the man in black had made some sort of pithy comment regarding his pure, unrestricted elation, but his brain wasn't listening – it was too busy rocketing through cities teeming with users, scurrying from site to site, buying and selling and talking and trading and any number of other things. Here there was magic. Here there was light. Here there was_ life_.  
  
He was home.  
  
-----  
  
Ganon doffed his fedora and left the decker to do his work. That the boy would take care of things he was certain; fifty thousand rupees was no sum of money to ignore on a whim, no matter how engrossed in one's play one was. That he had to liquefy all his assets to do so, including his cushy pension as a retired general, didn't bother him either.  
  
After tonight, money would be immaterial.  
  
He shuffled off quickly through the mazelike stone basement. Left, right, left, straight for three intersections, left again, then a switch on the bottom-left of the dead end. Yes, just like he'd specified, the rock melted away, revealing the sacrificial chambers beyond. The architect had done good work; Ganondorf almost regretted that such a talented man, truly a blessing from the goddesses, would die tonight along with the rest of this marble city.  
  
Well. So be it. The goddesses bless us enough that we may destroy what blessings we must.  
  
He walked quickly through the crimson veil, his black cloak billowing behind him. Beyond the veil lay a completely different world; it was a classical temple, beautified with tapestries of scarlet and green, dimly illuminated by candlelight slightly muddled by spiraling incense. Flying buttresses kept the ceiling afloat, and in the middle of the grand chamber, surrounded by five marble pillars, was a single altar, with a blonde Hylian in a red satin dress chained to it.  
  
"Princess Zelda. You're a very clever girl, you know. Fleeing all the way to Termina, taking refuge as a jazz singer in seedy bars. Did you know it took us three years to find you?"  
  
"If it's all the same to you, I'd rather it have taken longer," Zelda spat.  
  
Ganon chuckled mirthlessly. "Yes, I'd expected that. I'd expected one such has you to have no appreciation of the things that you will bring about. Imagine, Princess, a world without war, with all people united in their love for their leader... there is no longer rich, nor is there poor, nor is there weak nor strong; there is only the master and the subservient."  
  
"You want to know what I think of it? I think you're a tyrant, and deserve to have your mutilated corpse paraded through the streets of Kakariko, then drawn into quarters and dashed upon four separate islands in the grand sea. I think you're mad, and I want nothing to do with you. But, of course, you already know this."  
  
"Yes, I do." Ganon sighed. "But the show must go on, Princess. For what it's worth, you're a grand singer, and the world will be a lesser place without you."  
  
He drew a serpentine dagger, engraved with runes with meanings long- forgotten even to those scholars of the most arcane lore, and began to chant. It was a dirty chant, guttural and vile, with each syllable building up to a discordant crescendo, echoing off the walls and shaking the pillars, taking on an inhuman quality, until it most resembled the tormented shrieks of the eternal damned...  
  
And Zelda screamed.  
  
-----  
  
He'd never done anything easier since he cracked his first porn site. Hacker and code became one, with his mind a thunderstorm of mathematics and functions; the police encryption was no match for him. To the naked eye the firewall would look like a formless mass of numbers in no discernible pattern. Link's eyes were not naked eyes – they were hacker's eyes. The formless mass gained form and shape; it was a fractal, with clearly defined beginnings and ends, and exactly 65, 536 entry points, only one of which would take him through to the police database.  
  
The fractal shattered at the touch of Link's decryption algorithms. He was through. This was not, he decided, the time for a deft touch; with his virus templates he destroyed the monitor functions; a volley of attacks felled the rapid response system, and a quick DOS using corporate networks clogged up the 911 emergency lines. Satisfied, he did a loop of victory, tracing a circle in the electronic night, and jacked out, ready to enjoy his earnings.  
  
Then he heard the scream.  
  
Fuck it. It was none of his business. He should go home and spend some money, maybe buy a better goddamn hotel room or something. Something for himself. Upgrade the Eagle, maybe.  
  
But...  
  
Wasn't he partially responsible for what happened? He'd just disabled the police in the entire city for an hour, at least, and that was more than enough time for unspeakable evils to visit themselves upon this poor girl. And that made whatever happened his business entirely.  
  
Fuck.  
  
He sighed dejectedly and drew the pistol out of his coat, tossing the VR headset onto the ground. If he made it through tonight he could get a better model anyway. Now the only task that remained was navigating the maze of tunnels. He ran, his path twisting left and right, to and fro, possibly in circles, until a column of pure energy shattered the stone walls. Through the holes came the laugh, that horrible laugh, which haunted his dreams.  
  
"Behold, Princess!" came the voice. "Behold the power of your goddesses, the power of the sun, the power of the universe itself, sitting in the palm of my hand! Let there be _light!_"  
  
And there was light...  
  
Link dimmed his vision with a quick mental command to his ocular implants and kept walking. Even so, the glare was nigh-blinding. A poet would say that he was staring into the very face of God. Link was no poet. He just thought it was goddamn bright.  
  
A quick infrared scan of the chamber from which the energy came revealed two bodies, one prone on some sort of surface and one floating in mid-air, probably through some antigrav implants or clothes. Link clicked off the safety on his aging pistol and switched back to normal vision.  
  
He nearly had a heart-attack; in fact, he probably would have, if not for his body's surprising resilience, developed over years of overexertion while connected to the Net. The man in black was suspended over some sort of temple, with a gleaming tear in space floating some hundred feet above the ground. The girl from the bar was chained to an altar on the ground, screaming as the life was sucked out of her – or that was his best guess; white light was streaming towards the man in black out of her eyes and mouth. He fired off a warning shot.  
  
"God dammit, man, are you trying to kill her?" Link screamed out into the chamber.  
  
"There are larger things at stake than the life of a pretty jazz singer, Link," boomed the man in black, his voice assaulting the hacker from every direction. "Take your money and go."  
  
"Who.. who the hell are you, anyway?" stammered the shocked decker. "And how did you know my name?"  
  
"I know all! I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end! I am the way! Bow to your master, boy, for the lord of the worlds has come to claim his throne!" He threw off his fedora and revealed a noble face, a Hylian face, with eyes alight with holy fire. "Run, puny hacker, and take the girl with you, if you wish. Just allow me this one last use..."  
  
He gestured, and the woman's hand rose, a golden triangle lighting up on her delicate, white-gloved hand. Then it flickered and vanished.  
  
"The Triforce of Wisdom is mine, boy. The Triforce of Power is now within my reach. Tell that to the King of Hyrule, if you wish, if you can escape this prison of marble. You cannot stop me. Enjoy your city – your world, really – while you can."  
  
Yeah, whatever. Link rushed over to the woman's side and shot off the chains. She was unconscious. Shit. He lifted her onto his shoulders and ran, while the mechanical cackling of the man in black chased him from the distance...  
  
Then the ground shuddered, with a grand cacophony of screams and footfalls heard in the distance. A great boulder crashed through the ceiling of the club above. A few minutes brought Link and the girl to the entrance of the club, and a few more to a private jet in the parking lot, abandoned in the panic. Link set her down, and with the girl safe, looked at the starry night sky...  
  
The moon was exploding.  
  
"Holy shit!" he cursed, smashing in the window of the jet and searching for the lock. The Moon's gravity kept Clock City in the sky. No moon, no float, and the gleaming city of white comes crashing down. Didn't the man in black say something about this? No time for that now. Desperately, he clawed at the latch to the door and pried it open.  
  
Thank the goddesses, it was a new model. He jacked himself into its navigational computer and shattered the security with admirable strength, if little subtlety. What had the man in black said? Hyrule? Well, as good a place as any to start... this city was dead. The thought had barely enough time to impress itself on the barkeep-turned-vagrant as the jet lifted off from the doomed city and sped away into the black night.  
  
----  
  
**AUTHOR'S NOTES**: This version of the story isn't any different from the original version I posted about a week and a half ago, I just noticed some glaring errors, in spelling/grammar and in my planned continuity, that I hadn't noticed while editing it for the first time. I guess what you have prereaders for, and what you don't write and edit at 4 AM for. Live and learn, I guess.  
  
Review and I'll send you a cookie. An e-cookie, but a cookie nonetheless!  
  
Oh, and for the probably three of you that read this last time, the next chapter should be out in a week or so, if I can deny myself my F-Zero GX fix long enough to finish it.  
  
Tarrah. 


End file.
